Posted by so on June 14, 2005, at 21:00:01
In reply to Re: Out of interest - closing all PB boards, posted by NikkiT2 on June 14, 2005, at 17:12:02
>
> Sorry, I'm not willing to disclose the details of the sites.I'm not asking for details. I am adept at locating sources when I need information. I was instead responding to your statement "Would you rather we discussed..." which prefaced your comparative of other sites you are involved in. I am saying that to reply substantively to your suggestion of a topic for discussion regarding administration of networked communities, I would need to independently review sources. I stated that my primary concern here involves this site, which, unlike the sites you mention, can be read by anyone with Internet access.
> and none can be read by non-members.
Then at least in that regard, none of the ones to which you refer seem similar to Psychobabble.
> Have you considered setting up your own board, where you could dictate the rules?The descriptive verb for my role in most of the community communication I facilitate is usually something other than "dictate." Most of the facilities I have set up I have no ambition of owning. I have found that community ownership (even the way the Crown owns statutory services though I prefer other collective models) sometimes provides qualities not always found in individually owned endeavors.
> I guess I am failing to see why you want to change PB so much, when its not your time or money going into it.
>
What one sees sometimes depends on how one directs their focus. Apparently you can recognize that some of my time goes into this board. If I'm not mistaken, you have an interest in how I budget my time. Why do you invest time in other boards? If you further contemplate why you invest your time in on-line message boards you might better understand why I invest my time, if you are interested in understanding and supporting my goals.>> I also believe there are a number who aren't striving towards that goal.
In a therpuetic community, cross-talk analyzing other members commitment to certain goals is sometimes consistent with the purpose of the venue. Especially in a therapeutic environment that provides a degree of safety for members because it is not available for reading by anyone with internet access, such cross talk can help members review their commitments. So far, perhaps becuase of the environment of trust needed to make them work, therapuetic communities oriented toward mental health issues have not widely used open asynchronous networks.
> none of the others have people who seem quite so desperate
To some people familiar with communities in which members have a strong interest in administration of the community, such people don't always "seem" so desperate.
>there is occasionally a dissenting voice, and usually this voice gets abusive
Because of historical differences in the way populations assemble as communities, different parts of the world tend to foster various cultural tendencies. Distributed networks can bring these cultural propensities in close dialectic proximity. In the United States, dissent is highly valued, and in the past 50 years, the value of dissent has appreciated. From experience, we have learned to productively utilize several means of dissent other than abuse.
> two of the ones I have worked with have been running fo 20+ years
I'm trying to get my mind around what networked communities were doing 20 years ago. TCP was about three years old, IBM released the 80386 processer, the NSF took over administration of ARPA and established an acceptable use policy. There were at that time about 2,000 hosts. Sometime between then and 1990, when the number of hosts reached about 300,000 and CERN developed the World Wide Web, I recall a well-documented suicide of a member of the dissenting e-mail groups that challenged the NSF education-and-research-only policy and established freewheeling newsgroups. Those e-mail lists are published somewhere - I recall them because they are a landmark in the evolution of asynchronous networked communication and the particular suicide of a member who had been involved in growing dialectic controversy is often-cited marker identified by those who have studied the way discourse developed in those groups.
From the context, though, it seems you must be discussing both face-to-face and networked groups, both support type, including those you say you helped set up, and some TCs that must have been around for some time before they began using network technology. And as you say, none of them are like psycho-babble or even like the early e-mail communites at least insofar as they are read by members only.
poster:so
thread:511917
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20050614/msgs/512794.html